The coolness factor of Linux

Can your Windows Vista PC do the cool things in the video below? How many bucks do you have to shell out to get something close to this on Windows? Can it do these wonderful things out of the box?

The answer’s no. I took the time to produce a small showcase of what modern Linux is capable of. This is, honestly, my typical (non-work) computing session, in 90 seconds. The cool Linux things you’re about to see will leave you drooling:

Used Ardour to create a mini-mix of The world is mine, for the audio track.

Used mencoder to encode the audio and copy the DivX file into the final DivX video. This is the command line: mencoder youtube.avi -audiofile track.mp3 -oac mp3lame -ovc copy -o final.avi

Uploaded the final video to YouTube.

Uploaded the final video to my Web site.

Wrote this post.

All done with Free Software. Free as in beer, Free as in freedom. Most remarkably, all software was installed using packages specifically done for Fedora Core... this proves useful applications are available to install by point-and-click. And I hate compiling from source.

Some software used here is patent-encumbered. This doesn't apply to my country, though.

The hardware powering this video

Nothing special, really. If anything, it's very old. It couldn't even capture 10 frames per second in real-time! Thus, the video is kind of "fast". Here are the specs:

a GeForce 2 MX. Beryl runs slowly because of it. It also runs slowly because I told it to run only at 10 FPS.

768 MB of RAM. The system swapped heavily because of all the loaded applications.